You gained some weight, which is exactly what you were supposed to do. Your abdominal muscles — two parallel bands of muscles that support your core — stretched out. Think about it: The average newborn weighs about 7 pounds 3. Your abdominal muscles abs and the connective tissue had to stretch apart to make room for that. At the same time, your small intestine, sigmoid colon , and stomach politely shifted over to give even baby more room.
On top of the weight gain and the stretching, your body produced hormones to make the connective tissue more elastic. Breathe in that newborn scent — you worked hard to earn it. The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists endorses the Institute of Medicine guidelines for weight gain in pregnancy. Depending on your body mass index BMI , you should gain between 11 and 40 pounds 5 to 18 kilograms during a pregnancy with one baby and 25—62 pounds 11 to 28 kilograms when pregnant with twins.
Sweating tends to increase as your pregnancy hormone levels drop. By the end of the first month, you may have shed up to 20 pounds 9 kilograms without too much effort. Wait another 2 weeks for your uterus to shrink back to its original size and your tummy will look flatter. According to the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics , breastfeeding moms use to calories daily to make the full amount of milk that most babies need from birth to 6 months.
That said, not all moms drop the pounds quickly while breastfeeding. Most doctors and physical therapists recommend waiting 6 weeks before starting a formal exercise program if you had an uncomplicated vaginal delivery or 8 weeks if you had a cesarean delivery. Getting some exercise and eating healthfully will help you get back to your pre-pregnancy weight within a few months.
Remember the connective tissue between your abdominal muscles that stretched out? Still, few studies have evaluated DR treatment thoroughly enough for there to be definitive clinical guidelines about how to treat it.
The clinicians I interviewed who have diagnosed and treated hundreds of DR cases collectively agree that it can be treated. But they stress that the abdominals are only part of the equation. McGurk coaches women to reconnect to their pelvic floor and their transverse abdominis muscles, which can essentially turn off during pregnancy and childbirth. Abdominal exercise, coaching, and visualization that incorporates the pelvic floor and proper breathing techniques inhaling when relaxing, exhaling when contracting can reestablish the connection between the muscles and the brain and strengthen not only the abdominals but also the pelvic floor, she says.
A review of eight studies evaluating what impact exercise has on preventing or healing diastasis was inconclusive. Drawing in involves inhaling to fill the belly with air, then exhaling and moving the belly back toward the spine. Willoughby says the key is to inhale as you relax muscles and then engage as you exhale.
But in the study, the subjects were only measured doing the exercises in a lab, not over a period of time. Brandi Kirk has treated DR for a decade. She and others trained in visceral manipulation, a physical therapy technique developed by French osteopath Jean-Pierre Barral , have applied it to the small intestine and seen DR patients improve function and narrow their gaps.
Kirk presented the findings of a very small case study of the technique at the American Physical Therapy Association conference, and will expand her study next year. A controlled trial from Cairo University in Egypt recently discovered that women who used neuromuscular electrical stimulation, which uses electrical current to get muscles to contract, on their abdominal muscles in addition to exercise saw more DR improvement than women who did exercise alone.
Some doctors opt to repair DR with laparoscopic surgery or abdominoplasty, often accompanied by liposuction. This can be a viable option for severe cases of diastasis and abdominal hernia. DR is technically healed once it measures two finger widths or less. But the pelvic health physical therapists are concerned with more than measurements — they want to see that the tissues support the abdomen, and that woman can function without pain elsewhere in the body.
Some health care providers and fitness instructors believe that a flabby postpartum belly can be flattened simply with abdominal exercise, such as crunches — which many people with DR end up doing wrong and with too much force. Are you feeling the two sides of the TA glide together? Particularly, crunches done wrong can encourage diastasis, or worsen it. PTs tell pregnant and postpartum women to avoid any sit-up-like motion or abdominal exercise in which the head or feet leave the floor.
Upper body twisting, spinal extension like in a bridge pose , and bearing down during a bowel movement can increase pressure on the linea alba and encourage muscle separation. Anything that forces the belly to bulge can pose a risk for further separation or even abdominal hernia, when an organ protrudes through a gap. A common occurrence clinicians see leading to DR is when pregnant women ignore their core altogether.
Keep those muscles active through exercise. That may help prevent DR or speed recovery. Bowman says OBGYNs often tell pregnant women to avoid abdominal exercise altogether because they, like many, are only thinking of crunches.
Instead, they can do strengthening exercises like drawing in or bracing that engage abdominal muscles and pelvic floor muscles. See the Momma Strong for more details on the exercises. Notice the difference in space between hips before and after use of Shrinkx Hips.
The most common reason women struggle to get a flat stomach after having a baby is due to an issue known as diastasis recti. Diastasis recti occurs when the tissue that holds your abdominal muscles together stretches or rips. In fact, there was a study in Norway that found nearly a third of moms have or develop diastasis recti a year after giving birth. If I was to speculate, I think you might fall into this percentage of women who suffer from separated abs, but this is great news because this means there are specific, targeted exercises that can help you!
There was an amazing and detailed post done by National Public Radio that shows you how to find out if you have diastasis recti and what you can do about it here. Another common problem is an issue with your pelvic floor. The pelvic floor affects things like urination and the ability to hold your internal organs up and in. We worked with an exercise therapist, Brooke Cates, to create 5 targeted exercises that can help you start healing your body and pelvic floor as soon as 1 day postpartum and I think it will still be incredibly valuable to you even a year after giving birth.
Your pelvic floor is different than kegels in that it focuses on strengthening the inner muscles of your body and not just the external area. You can download the exercises below! Sending you lots of love, patience and grace. You grew a human!
Our bodies are powerful, amazing machines that can be fixed and tweaked if we listen to them. I hope the different possible issues I discussed here help you pinpoint what your body needs help with and that you are able to take some positive steps forward to heal.
We have moms around the country that have expressed wonderful stories of how our wraps and panties have aided in their recovery process. I've been wearing it almost everyday since I came home from the hospital, at least 8 hours a day.
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